The Rowan Center for Sports Communication and Social Impact invited alumni Jeremy Kashan to speak to students on Oct. 27 in King Auditorium, 10 years after his graduation. Kashan joined NBC Sports early in his career, but has since blazed a trail with Overtime as an associate director.
While at Rowan, Kashan was the sports director for Rowan Television Network for several years. He was also a producer for several of the theater shows the University put on, and worked at Comcast Sportsnet Philadelphia.
“I started out pulling cable for the locker room shots … for the Sixers and the Flyers,” Kashan said. “I worked my way up to doing camera and some teleprompter and some of the other jobs around the studio.”
Kashan quickly realized that lugging heavy cameras wasn’t his long-term plan. Several of his older coworkers who had been working there for over 30 years warned him that their backs were hurting from all the camera running. They told him to pay attention to his writing and producing classes.
“It was honest feedback … it got me thinking,” Kashan said. “I applied for a number of different gigs, and the one that finally stuck was as a production assistant with NBC Sports in Stamford.”
During his six years at NBC Stamford, Kashan produced two Olympic Games, as well as games for the NFL and NHL. He even produced dog shows and horse races for a national audience. He also created a variety of features and documentary content for NBC. But eventually, television wasn’t the major platform for sports anymore.
“Things were starting to really buzz in that digital space with social media, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube,” Kashan said. “I got the opportunity, saw a job that I applied for doing that type of work at overtime, and gave it a go.”
Now, Kashan works at Overtime as an associate director and branded content producer. Over time has become a massive part of the sports social media landscape, garnering over 100 million followers across all social media platforms and over three billion views per month.
“I work mostly on the longer form YouTube shows at Overtime,” Kashan said. “We do the ‘NFL Drafthouse show.’ We do another one for basketball, the ‘NBA Drafthouse show.’”
Kashan has had opportunities to feature quite a few notable athletes, including the Thompson twins. One of his most memorable experiences was driving around with current New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart.
“He was driving … I believe he was house hunting in North Jersey,” Kashan said. “As he’s going down the highway … we had a great clip that came out where he drove straight through the EZ Pass, and he told us that he had no clue what they were and that he’d been going through them for a while now. That clip went pretty viral … we had a lot of fun with it.”
A lot has changed in the media landscape over the past decade since Kashan left Rowan. Now, social media content is what most consumers spend their time watching compared to television. With all those changes, Kashan emphasized that he wouldn’t have gotten as far in his career if he hadn’t compelled himself to make content. He encouraged every student to learn to do the same.
“I wasn’t so into social media when I was in school here,” Kashan said. “Get your hands dirty, make mistakes. Social media is a great opportunity to, depending on what you want to do, make some content.”
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